Giddings family agrees to drop death penalty

Stephen McDaniel’s mother says ‘it’s wonderful’ her son won’t face death if convicted

Macon Judicial District Attorney David Cooke, backed by assistant DA Nancy Scott Malcor, speaks during a press conference Thursday held to announce the dropping of the pursuit of the death penalty by his office in the prosecution of Stephen McDaniel in the murder of Lauren Giddings.
gblankenship@macon.com

JUNE 30, 2011: Authorities gather evidence at the apartment complex of Lauren Giddings, a Mercer University law school graduate who was last seen by her friends June 25. Authorities found a torso in a garbage bin beside her apartment building earlier in the day. They would later identify the torso as Giddings’.
wmarshall@macon.com

JUNE 30, 2011: Authorities use a dog to help search for evidence in the Lauren Giddings case outside the apartment of one of her neighbors, Stephen McDaniel.
wmarshall@macon.com

Stephen McDaniel spoke to reporters June 30, 2011, the day part of the body of his neighbor, Lauren Giddings, was found in a garbage can at their apartment complex in downtown Macon. He was later charged in her killing.
wmarshall@macon.com

JUNE 30, 2011: Police lead Stephen McDaniel to his Barristers Hall apartment in Macon. Later that day, McDaniel was charged with burglary.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 1, 2011: Stephen McDaniel walks into court at the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center for a first appearance hearing.McDaniel admitted to police in a “voluntary statement” that he’d committed other burglaries at the Barristers Hall apartments, where he and Giddings lived next to one another, said Greg Winters, district attorney for the Macon Judicial Circuit.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 1, 2011: Stephen McDaniel holds a pamphlet as he waits to be called to the bench for his first appearance in court at the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 1, 2011: Stephen McDaniel stands before a magistrate at the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center, surrounded by Bibb County bailiffs, his attorney, Macon police Lt. Carl Fletcher and District Attorney Greg Winters. Police charged McDaniel with a second count of burglary, and his bail from an earlier burglary charge was rescinded at the hearing.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 5, 2011: The fence in front of Lauren Giddings’ apartment was memorialized by her friends and others even as Macon police guarded the scene during the investigation.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 6, 2011: Macon Police Chief Mike Burns tells the media that the body found outside Barrister Apartments was Lauren Giddings.DNA test results confirmed that the body found beside Giddings’ apartment building June 30 was hers, Burns said.The body had been dismembered, he said, and “we have not found all the body parts yet,” despite searches in and around the Barristers Hall apartments on Georgia Avenue.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 8, 2011: Bridgitte Basey of Phoenix City, Ala., searches a wooded area off Glenridge Drive where cadaver dogs were looking for remains of Lauren Giddings. Police said they had a tip that she ran in the area before her disappearance.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 8, 2011: George Giddings, Lauren Gidding’s uncle, drops trash from the balcony apartment of the law school graduate. Family members were going through the apartment looking for anything amiss.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 8, 2011: Karen Giddings, left, takes a close look at tributes paid to her daughter Lauren outside of the Barristers Hall apartment on Georgia Avenue as she and other family members went through her daughter’s personal effects.Sifting through her daughter’s belongings, she found a prayer book on her bed. Some prayer books in the apartment had highlighted sections.Although she knew that Lauren attended St. Joseph Catholic Church on Poplar Street, she didn’t know until after her daughter’s death that she often attended daily Mass.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 9, 2011: A large crowd attends a memorial Mass for Lauren Giddings at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Macon. Giddings, a Mercer University law student, often attended daily Mass there.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 9, 2011: Lauren Giddings’ parents, Bill and Karen, walk hand in hand to their seats at memorial Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church for their daughter.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 9, 2011: Sarah Gerwig-Moore, a law professor of Lauren Giddings' at Mercer University, speaks to the hundreds of people and dozens of Giddings’ family members and close friends during a memorial Mass for Giddings at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Macon.Gerwig-Moore said she instantly embraced Giddings’ friendly nature. “We all liked her immediately because of her warmth and sense of fun and just adored her as we got to know her,” Gerwig-Moore said.Gerwig-Moore had been reading Giddings’ journal entries and was pleased to see her student coming into her own as a public defender who often helped inmates who had nowhere to turn. “She was a gifted, humble woman who felt privileged to do work others shunned,” Gerwig-Moore said. “A brave soul, a servant to strangers and friends.”
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 9, 2011: Lauren Giddings’ mother, Karen, hugs a family member during a memorial Mass for Lauren Giddings at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Macon.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 12, 2011: Macon police take pictures inside Stephen McDaniel’s Barristers Hall apartment. Law enforcement officials arrived at the apartment complex sometime around 7 p.m. and entered McDaniel’s apartment about an hour later while executing a search warrant. Investigators took still photographs and video inside his apartment and later removed some brown paper bags from the unit. Police didn’t comment about the bags’ contents.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 13, 2011: Macon police crime scene investigator Sgt. Jeffrey Woodard removes a refrigerator from the Barristers Hall apartment beneath the one that was occupied by Lauren Giddings. The apartment’s tenant was in the process of moving during the time Giddings was missing, said Marty Bush, co-owner of the Barristers Hall apartments. Most of the furnishings had been removed before Giddings’ body was found, and the tenant had since finished moving out.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 13, 2011: Macon police detective David Patterson loads a refrigerator into a van from the Barristers Hall apartment beneath the one that was occupied by Lauren Giddings.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 13, 2011: Macon police detectives David Patterson, Daniel Shurley, Brandon Holt and Scott Chapman sift through curbside garbage containers for evidence at the Barristers Hall apartments where Lauren Giddings remains were found. In the two weeks since Giddings’ torso was discovered, Macon police officers had logged more than 400 hours of overtime, Chief Mike Burns said.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 20, 2011: Macon police crime scene investigators prepare to enter Stephen McDaniel’s Georgia Avenue apartment to perform another search for evidence in the investigation of the murder of Lauren Giddings.Four officers entered McDaniel’s upstairs apartment, No. 4, about 2:10 p.m. They carried several brown paper bags with them and later took a large brown plastic container inside. About 6 p.m., they came out with four large paper bags and the plastic container. The search marked at least the third time that authorities have went through the apartment for evidence.
gblankenship@macon.com

JULY 22, 2011: Attorney Floyd Buford, left, talks with Stephen McDaniel before his hearing related to burglary charges at the Bibb County Courthouse.During the hearing, Buford contended that the Bibb County District Attorney’s Office should not be allowed to prosecute McDaniel on the burglary charges because McDaniel worked for the prosecutors’ office for about three months earlier in 2011. Superior Court Judge Tripp Self later ruled that there would be no conflict of interest.
gblankenship@macon.com

JULY 22, 2011: Glenda McDaniel watches as her son, Stephen McDaniel, is led away from a courtroom in the Bibb County Courthouse after a hearing related to burglary charges. Toward the end of the hearing, she stood up and tearfully asked to speak. When she was told she couldn’t, she quietly sat back down in the front row of spectators behind the defense table.
gblankenship@macon.com

JULY 23, 2011: Mark McDaniel, right, gets help from family and friends moving his son Stephen’s belongings from his Barristers Hall apartment on Georgia Avenue in Macon.
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 23, 2011: Mark McDaniel, top left, gets help from family and friends moving his son Stephen’s belongings from his Barristers Hall apartment on Georgia Avenue in Macon. As the family carried furniture, a weight bench and barbells, boxes and bedding from the upstairs apartment and loaded them into the moving truck, Mark McDaniel stopped at the foot of the stairs to say his son was “doing as best as can be expected.”
bcabell@macon.com

JULY 29, 2011: Lauren Giddings’ kitchen in her apartment still had fingerprint dust on the walls and fixtures, after police searched the apartment for evidence in her killing.
womarshall@macon.com

JULY 29, 2011: A small patch of carpet was removed from the floor of Lauren Giddings’ bedroom in her apartment during the police investigation.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 29, 2011: Richard Holbrook, with Frank Irby Plumbing, reaches through a wall in Lauren Giddings’ apartment to help remove a drain stuck in the bath tub at Stephen McDaniel’s apartment. Once the old drains were removed, he was to install a new drain and trap on the tub. Macon police removed the traps by cutting holes in the walls of the apartments.
wmarshall@macon.com

JULY 29, 2011: A plumber with Frank Irby Plumbing works to remove a drain stuck in the bath tub at Stephen McDaniel’s apartment. Once the old drain was removed, he was to install a new drain and trap on the tub. Macon police removed the traps by cutting holes in the walls of the apartments.
wmarshall@macon.com

AUGUST 2, 2011: Fred Golba, of Coast to Coast Canine Service, jumps back into the Ocmulgee River after searching for the remains of Lauren Giddings near a tree along the bank between Second Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
jvorhees@macon.com

AUGUST 3, 2011: Stephen McDaniel waits in front of a Bibb County magistrate for his attorney Floyd Buford as he makes his first appearance in court on a charge of murder in connection with the death of Lauren Giddings. An arrest warrant issued late Aug. 2 charging McDaniel with murder said police recovered a hacksaw at the Barristers Hall apartment complex where he and Giddings were next-door neighbors. The warrant said investigators also found the saw’s packaging material inside McDaniel’s apartment. Subsequent tests on the hacksaw by FBI experts revealed traces of Giddings’ DNA, according to a law enforcement officer familiar with the warrant.
bcabell@macon.com

AUGUST 3, 2011: Bibb County Sheriff Jerry Modena, right, stands by as Stephen McDaniel, left, waits for his attorney before going in front of a Bibb County magistrate for his first appearance in court on a charge of murder in Lauren Giddings’ death.
bcabell@macon.com

AUGUST 3, 2011: Stephen McDaniel makes his way back to jail after his first appearance hearing in Lauren Giddings’ death. The hearing lasted less than five minutes.
bcabell@macon.com

AUGUST 4, 2011: When Macon Police Department crime scene investigators and workers from the city’s Public Works Department removed the bath tub from Lauren Giddings’ apartment at Barristers Hall on Georgia Avenue, one side of the tub was taped and covered.At the time, police declined to say why the cast-iron tub was taken out, but a source familiar with the investigation referred to the edge of the tub as a “butcher block” because, on close inspection, it appeared to have been marred with cut marks similar to those left by a saw.
gblankenship@macon.com

AUGUST 6, 2011: Funeral services for Lauren Giddings are held at St. Mary of the Mills Catholic Church in Laurel, Md. As a soaking rainstorm fell on Laurel, a suburban community of 25,000 halfway between Washington and Baltimore, a few hundred umbrella-protected mourners filled into the church to remember Giddings.
MCT

AUGUST 6, 2011: Pallbearers walk the remains of Lauren Giddings into her funeral service at St. Mary of the Mills Catholic Church in Laurel, Md.
MCT

AUGUST 6, 2011: Pallbearers walk out of the funeral service for Lauren Giddings at St. Mary of the Mills Catholic Church in Laurel, Md.During the service, Monsignor Michael Wilson said it was natural to feel angry and bitter, but urged the mourners to focus on her life, not her death.
MCT

AUGUST 6, 2011: Mourners leave after a funeral service for Lauren Giddings at St. Mary of the Mills Catholic Church in Laurel, Md. At the service, a large, sepia-toned portrait of Giddings stood near the altar, surrounded by pink and white flowers. Pink was Giddings’ favorite color.
MCT

AUGUST 26, 2011: Glenda and Mark McDaniel, right, sit on front of some of Lauren Giddings’ family during Stephen McDaniel’s commitment hearing at the Bibb County Courthouse in Macon. They held hands the whole time. Glenda McDaniel, her eyes shut, lips moving, appeared to pray in the minutes before the proceeding began.
gblankenship@macon.com

AUGUST 26, 2011: Stephen McDaniel leaves court after his commitment hearing in Macon. More evidence in the investigation of the murder of Lauren Giddings came out during the hearing, enough that Bibb County Magistrate Judge Bill Shurling bound the case over to Bibb Superior Court.The judge denied bond for McDaniel, who had been in jail since July 1, first on burglary charges unrelated to the murder. He was charged with murder a month later and with seven counts of sexual exploitation of children on Aug. 23, 2011. Police allegedly found photographs of children in sex acts on a computer flash drive in his apartment.
gblankenship@macon.com

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011: Law enforcement personnel search for the remains of Lauren Giddings at the Wolf Creek Landfill in Twiggs County.Twenty or so FBI agents from field offices in Georgia and Virginia with expertise in landfill searches joined a pair of Macon police officers and a handful of volunteers.
jvorhees@macon.com

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011: Law enforcement personnel search for the remains of Lauren Giddings at the Wolf Creek Landfill in Twiggs County. Police had already searched other sites, including Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon’s landfill, parks and along the Ocmulgee River.
jvorhees@macon.com

Stephen McDaniel is led from a courtroom in the Bibb County Courthouse after an appearance in December 2011. McDaniel’s lawyers filed motions Friday asking a judge to throw out potential evidence seized during searches in a roughly 20-hour span after Lauren Giddings' torso was found. They argued the warrants were issued based on information gleaned through previous “illegal warrantless searches.”
gblankenship@macon.com

DECEMBER 12, 2011: Stephen McDaniel is led from a court room in the Bibb County Courthouse after entering a plea of not guilty on sex charges. The charges stemmed from the discovery of digital images depicting children engaged in sex acts while police searched McDaniel’s apartment in the days after Lauren Giddings’ body was discovered. McDaniel’s parents, who had attended other court appearances, were not in the courtroom for their son’s arraignment on the sexual exploitation charges.
gblankenship@macon.com

APRIL 3, 2012: Bibb District Attorney Greg Winters speaks with Lauren Giddings’ friends and family before Stephen McDaniel’s bond hearing. During the hearing, McDaniel stared straight ahead while Winters read a boastful Internet posting that McDaniel allegedly wrote about plying a “sexy” neighbor with alcohol, which knocks her out. The post mentions having sex and then, after the neighbor dies, having a celebratory “barbecue” of her limbs before discarding her torso.The authorship of the posting has since come in doubt. At a Tuesday hearing, prosecutors and defense attorneys have agreed that the post should be removed from consideration in the case.
wmarshall@macon.com

APRIL 3, 2012: David Vandiver, Lauren Giddings’ boyfriend, waits for Stephen McDaniel’s bond hearing to begin in Macon. Vandiver met Giddings in 2007. A year or so before enrolling in Mercer University’s law school, she landed an internship as a project assistant at the downtown Atlanta law office where he worked. He was in the company lunchroom watching ESPN. They said hello. Two minutes of small talk. She mentioned being from Maryland. He said he’d gone to school in D.C. They didn’t cross paths again for another few weeks, late that September, at a golf tournament in honor of a colleague of his who’d died of cancer. Giddings and Vandiver hit it off. They started dating.
wmarshall@macon.com

APRIL 3, 2012: After listening to arguments from the state and Stephen McDaniel’s attorneys, Superior Court Judge Phillip Brown asked if anybody had considered McDaniel a threat to himself, during a hearing in which District Attorney Greg Winters asked that bond for McDaniel be set at $2.5 million. While Brown did not make a decision on bond that day, he would later set the amount at $850,000.
bcabell@macon.com

APRIL 17, 2012: Kathy Mann, aunt of Lauren Giddings, looks a wreath and banner she, her husband, Darrell, and her mother, Pat Atkinson, placed on the fence in front of the apartments where Giddings lived. Giddings birthday is April 18.
gblankenship@macon.com

Stephen McDaniel’s mother says ‘it’s wonderful’ her son won’t face death if convicted

For weeks, Lauren Giddings’ kin have discussed what fate her alleged killer should face. Some believe in the death penalty. Others think life in prison is a fate worse than death.

Thursday, Bibb County District Attorney David Cooke announced he was removing capital punishment from the case against Stephen McDaniel, almost 14 months after the former district attorney announced he was seeking the death penalty against the man charged in Giddings’ death.

Billy Giddings, Lauren’s father, said immediate family mulled her accused killer’s fate over during their daily phone conversations and around the dinner table.

He said his wife’s religion “won’t allow her” to see her daughter’s killer put to death. Karen Giddings is Catholic, as was Lauren.

“We’re all in agreement, we just don’t want to drag it out any longer,” he said by phone Thursday.

Cooke now expects the case to go to trial within the next year and a half as opposed to what could be several years.

Billy Giddings said his family’s decision was a tough one.

“It was a decision where we had to go wholeheartedly one way or the other,” he said. “It’s certainly not that we don’t think that he’s not guilty or doesn’t deserve it, the worst of the worst.”

Kaitlyn Wheeler, Lauren’s sister, said she believes in the death penalty.

“I think the death penalty was made for cases like this. It doesn’t get worse than this,” she said. “It doesn’t always mean it’s what’s best for the case. It doesn’t always mean it’s right.”

Lauren Giddings’ dismembered torso was discovered wrapped in plastic bags in a curbside garbage bin outside her Georgia Avenue apartment in June 2011.

The rest of her remains have never been found. McDaniel allegedly used a hacksaw to dismember Giddings. Packaging for the saw was discovered in McDaniel’s apartment.

Cooke discusses case with family

Cooke said he met with the slain Mercer University law graduate’s parents several weeks ago and determined they hadn’t been “fully briefed about the case.”

During the meeting, prosecutors and the Giddings had an open conversation about the case.

Wheeler said her family took note of Cooke’s opinions about the case while making their decision.

“We just always try to work for what’s best for the case,” she said.

Cooke, who took office in January, said he also talked with experts.

“When the family agrees and the experts agree and my personal judgment agrees, it’s best to move forward taking the case to trial while all of the evidence is fresh,” he said. “To me, it’s a no-brainer.”

Due to a FBI lab backlog, several items of trace evidence, including fibers, hair and the bathtub removed from Giddings’ apartment, won’t be tested until a trial date is set.

Cooke said the feelings of Karen Giddings, Lauren’s mother, weighed heavily in his decision.

“The woman who gives birth to the victim has the most sway with me,” he said.

“It’s wonderful,” she said upon hearing the news. “At this point, I’m not going to comment any more than just to say it’s wonderful.”

Floyd Buford, one of two lawyers representing McDaniel, said he planned to call the Bibb County jail and visit to share the news with his client. McDaniel, 27, has been held at the jail since his July 1, 2011, arrest on a burglary charge. Murder and sexual exploitation of children charges later were filed against him.

Buford said he’s never thought the case against McDaniel should be one seeking capital punishment.

“When you look at the case and the facts that are going to come out ... those don’t add up to a case that should get the death penalty,” he said.

Franklin J. Hogue, another of McDaniel’s lawyers, said he and Buford can now cut the number of motions filed in the case in half since many pertain specifically to the death penalty.

Buford said he and Hogue may ask a judge to reconsider McDaniel’s bond in light of Cooke’s decision.

The judge may have taken the fact that McDaniel was facing the death penalty into consideration when setting his bond at $850,000 last April, Buford said.

‘Nothing’s enough to bring Lauren back’

For Kristin Miller, one of Giddings’ closest college friends, it was hard to hear Thursday that it’s now out of the realm of possibility that McDaniel, if convicted, might one day stand before a judge and be told he’s going to die.

It’s not that she’s vengeful.

“Nothing’s enough to bring Lauren back,” she said.

Miller, an Atlanta lawyer, said in her mind it seems as though McDaniel set up a circumstantial case that would be hard to solve.

Now that the death penalty is off the table, it’s like he succeeded at something, she said.

“He planned it that way. And to sort of reward him for evil is just ... perverse and sad,” Miller said. “Premeditation, it’s planning and plotting, is exactly what the death penalty is for. ... If anything ever cried out for the death penalty, this does.”

Sarah Gerwig-Moore, a Mercer University law professor, said Giddings expressed reservations about capital punishment during class discussions.

“She expressed and shared a lot of concern about the inequities in how the capital punishment is applied, about the painfulness of the process for everyone involved,” Gerwig-Moore said. “I think Lauren was as concerned about that as any student I’ve come across.”

Death penalty in Bibb County

Cooke’s decision comes a month and a half after he allowed a murder suspect in a 2005 killing to avoid capital punishment by pleading guilty. The suspect, Jomekia Pope, killed his ex-fiancee by dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire.

Last year, Cooke’s predecessor, Greg Winters, opted to drop death penalty prosecutions against four men, two of them accused of gunning down a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy in 2006.

When asked what it means for him to remove the ultimate punishment from two cases so early in his term, Cooke replied, “I’m going to examine every death penalty case on its own merit.”

The last time a Macon murderer was sentenced to die was in 1987, but killer Keith Patillo’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison because he was deemed mentally disabled.

Terry Michael Mincey, convicted in a 1982 slaying, was the last person put to death for a Bibb County murder. He was executed in 2001.

In December 2011, then-DA Greg Winters, citing McDaniel’s alleged crime as one that was “outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhuman in that it involved depravity of mind,” declared that his office aimed to send McDaniel to Georgia’s death row.

Winters declined comment Thursday regarding Cooke’s decision.

Giddings, a Maryland native, was McDaniel’s Mercer University law school classmate and next-door neighbor. She was found dead a month and a half after they graduated.

The two, who were not close as neighbors or students, had stayed on as tenants at their Georgia Avenue apartment complex to study for the state bar exam.

Although McDaniel has been granted a bond on the murder charge he is not eligible for bond on the 30 counts of sexual exploitation of children levied against him after authorities discovered images of child pornography on a flash drive in his apartment.